Sea Foam Colony
The Sea Foam Colony represents the ultimate form of non-diamondoid marine construction, vastly expanding the potential scale of structures through extreme performance while also providing a solution to the many dilemmas associated with the use of free-form organic design. SeaFoam is an idealized material that is projected to be produced as a result of current trends in the development of masonry technology. It is a recyclable foamed variable density geopolymer homogeneously reinforced with carbon nanofiber, producing a light fire-proof self-insulated and buoyant material with -at a given density- greater compression strength than concrete and greater tensile strength than steel at a fraction of the mass. It would be employed with a combination of production-on-demand material mixing, robotic extrusion, and robotic precision milling to produce structures through process combining rough-form extrusion casting with milled-in-place finishing. In effect, structures are made in a manner akin to the production of a surf board from poured polymer foam, with rough generic masses extruded and piled-up in place, rapidly curing, and then milled to a finished shape, the waste material immediately recycled. Using this material and technique, colony construction would be based on the creation of what is essentially a great monolithic structural foam mass that can be added to and subtracted to freely to allow for constant evolution of structure. The basic structural matrix of the colony would consist of a medium density foam that would be reinforced with higher density inclusions and shells to accommodate specific structural forms. Rough forms would be extruded in place and, when cured, milling robots would bore out space for inclusions of injected high density material and vias for utilities systems. Precision finished shapes would then be milled in place and a thin finish coating of high density non-reinforced geopolymer applied to provide a durable surface shell, possibly with specific colors or decorative textured included. PSPs platform structures would be made from precast individual cell units which are bonded together in-situ by poured-in-place material. Active PSPs would be clustered along the colony perimeter, where they need only function for certain distance inward from the edge -beyond which they have effectively absorbed all wave energy. The inner PSP cells, only functioning as static floats, would be filled with low density foam and incrementally strengthened with increases in colony scale by the addition of precast solid foam modules from the underside. Since the entire colony would be made of the same material surgical demolition and reconstruction would become an extension of the same original construction process, the material bonding to itself readily where surfaces have been properly prepared by surface stripping and milling. Thus the colony could freely evolve through this process of on-demand addition and subtraction of material. To deal with its constantly evolving structural integrity, the colony would employ a computer based master model of its entire built structure along with a network of formed-in-place sensors which allow colony computers to perform a continuous process of structural integrity modeling on the entire colony and any proposed changes. All colony structural types are likely to employ something similar to this but with the new capabilities of Sea Foam new and powerful dynamic finite element modeling would be used to accommodate non-uniform geometries and the radical non-Euclidean forms of organic design, allowing their easier interactive CAD modeling, CAE structural modeling and simulation, and CAM systems using a colony-wide spatial grid to allow their forms to be extruded and milled out on-demand with millimeter precision by in-field robots instead of relying on human labor. With such technology most of the drawbacks to using organic design would be eliminated and it would offer almost as much freedom of adaptation as the modular component technology of Utilihab construction. Organic forms would still have difficulty in integrating many kinds of equipment but this structural system would be as readily able to employ the simpler forms and retrofit finishing of Tectonic design as the more free-form shapes of organic designs, integrating the two readily where necessary. The use of Sea Foam would offer little change to the basic design approach of colonies except that they would be less confined to the limits of any large scale modular component system and would be able to employ structures of greater height and lightness owing to the superior performance of the material. It would, however, foreshadow the later development of NanoFoam which would employ the same monolithic approach to structural design with a diamondoid material which would be self-constructing and self-fabricate-in-place most active components and infrastructure elements. Thus the SeaFoam structure represents the likely essential form of marine colony and arcology structure -and the human built habitat on Earth in general- for the indefinite future. Peer Topics *Tectonic Colony *Organic Hybrid Colony *Submarine Habitats *Aquarius Earth-Terminus Parent Topics *Aquarian Colony Design Concepts Phases